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THE NEW YORKER, JULY 4, 2016
that humor could be a survival mech-
anism. She became able to joke and
laugh; before that, she said, she barely
spoke above a whisper. (Goldin also
told me that, for her, the camera was a
seductive tool, a way of becoming so-
cialized.) Fletcher remembers Goldin's
"passion to document": "She kept jour-
nals, then the photography became a
visual journal," recording the lives of her
friends. (Fletcher is one of
the most memorable sub-
jects in "The Ballad."Thin,
with large eyes, she cries,
fools around with a guy, and
searches for the meaning
of her own reflection in
a number of mirrors; the
images are a tender evoca-
tion of a young woman
who shows the camera
as much of her real self as she can.)
Perhaps Goldin's desire to document
her life and the lives around her, to hold
on to these moments forever, was a way
of o setting what had happened to her
sister. "I don't really remember my sister,"
she writes in the introduction to "The
Ballad." "In the process of leaving my
family, in re-creating myself, I lost the
real memory of my sister. I remember my
version of her, of the things she said, of
the things she meant to me. But I don't
remember the tangible sense of who she
was . . . what her eyes looked like, what
her voice sounded like. . . . I don't ever
want to lose the real memory of anyone
again."That need is as much the subject
of Goldin's photographs as the person
being shot; taking pictures is, for her, an
exchange that's filled with longing, even
as the moment disappears in real time.
B Goldin was eighteen,
she was living in Boston with a much
older man. (One of the best pictures in
"The Ballad," "Nan and Dickie in the
York Motel, New Jersey" ( ), shows
a pantyless Goldin being embraced from
behind by a fully clothed, balding man.
The image feels like a terrible, tunnel-
visioned, and dangerous secret.) Eventu-
ally, she fell in with a group of drag queens,
who hung out in a bar called the Other
Side, and began to photograph them. She
wanted to memorialize the queens, get
them on the cover of Vogue. She had no
interest in trying to show who they were
under the feathers and the fantasy: she
was in love with the bravery of their
self-creation, their otherness. Goldin was
re-creating herself, too. A picture
taken by Armstrong shows her with her
curly Bette Midler hair hanging loose
and frizzy, her eyebrows heavily pencilled,
striking a pose---a young woman imag-
ining herself as a drag queen. Illusions
on top of illusions, in a photograph, that
most realistic of artistic mediums. Gol-
din never had any real truck
with camera culture---the
predominantly straight-
male world of photography
in the sixties and seventies,
when dudes stood around
talking about apertures and
stroking their tripods, in an
e ort to butch up that sissy
job, otherwise known as
"making art."She took a few
courses at the New England School of
Photography, but was less engaged by the
technical instruction than by a class taught
by the photographer Henry Horenstein,
who recognized the originality of her
work. He turned her on to Larry Clark,
who had photographed teen-agers hav-
ing sex and shooting up in sixties Tulsa.
The intimacy of Clark's pictures---you
can almost smell the musk---inspired
Goldin. Here were noncommercial im-
ages that promoted not glamour but law-
less bohemianism, or just lawlessness.
She has always been drawn to bad-boy
posturing. ("Even when I was living in a
lesbian community in Provincetown, I
was sneaking o to sleep with men," she
told me with a gu aw.)
In , she enrolled at the School of
the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, where
she studied alongside Armstrong, Philip-
Lorca diCorcia, and Mark Morrisroe---
photographers driven by their color fan-
tasies of relationship drama and alienated
youth.There Goldin began working with
a Pentax, wide-angle lenses, and a flash.
This opened up her vista and her palette;
as Elisabeth Sussman, who co-curated the
"I'll Be Your Mirror" retrospective, pointed
out in her important catalogue essay, Goldin
"discovered her color in flashes of elec-
tricity. Even when photographing in natu-
ral light, she often unconsciously repli-
cated the e ect of artificial lighting."
In the summer of , Goldin rented
a house with Armstrong and his lover
in Provincetown, where she met the
writer and actress Cookie Mueller, who
appeared in a number of John Waters's
films, and whom she photographed ex-
tensively. In her book, "Cookie
Mueller," Goldin writes:
She was a cross between Tobacco Road and
a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman
I'd ever seen. . . . That summer I kept meeting
her at the bars, at parties and at barbecues with
her family---her girlfriend Sharon, her son Max,
and her dog Beauty. Part o how we got close
was through me photographing her---the pho-
tos were intimate and then we were.
Goldin and Mueller weren't involved ro-
mantically, but the pictures are filled with
romance; in them, Mueller emerges as
the star of her own movie, as she cud-
dles her son or holds Goldin protectively.
Goldin knew a fellow-conspirator---a
master of self-creation---when she saw
one. Looking at the warm, playful, and
wrenching photographs of Mueller in
"The Ballad" is like seeing a ghost---the
woman Barbara Goldin never got to be.
Mueller survived girlhood in postwar
Maryland and became herself. Barbara
didn't. (Mueller died, of , in .)
At the end of that Provincetown sum-
mer, Goldin had image after image of
her friends in the dunes, partying, liv-
ing their lives as if they had all the time
in the world. Because there was no dark-
room nearby, she used slide film, which
she had processed at the drugstore.
I , moved to New York
and rented a loft on the Bowery, which
Darryl Pinckney recalled in an essay
that he wrote for the "I'll Be Your Mir-
ror" catalogue:
Nan's Bowery loft had no windows or else they
were covered and this made her parties long, hi-
larious, dangerous events. You had no idea what
time it was or how light the sky was getting out
there. Her guests departed when they could ingest
no more and some didn't leave even then. . . . Things
started to swing lightly after a blender o lethal
banana concoctions had been emptied a few times.
Suddenly, out o nowhere, as i a bell had gone
o . . . people were running all over the place,
braying at the refrigerator, standing up with straws
or dollar bills still in their nostrils, trying to shove
their best friends over the hall banister. Sometimes
wewentontoclubs. . .andNanwould llapurse
with mysterious women's necessities as she stepped
over the sleeping and bestowed upon the copulat-
ing a privacy they did not give her and that she
didn't often ask for. I remember the rst telephone
conversation I ever had with Nan. "I'm among the
missing today," she said, and hung up.
The curator Marvin Heiferman was
working in New York then, at Castelli